When US-led coalition forces moved into Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001 and 2003 respectively, the conditions had already been laid for them to be battled to the death by local and foreign fighters committed to the Wahhabi ideology. When Western troops withdrew, the ideologues attacked recently installed governments with renewed “substantial and sustained” Saudi support, in the words of Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service. The goal seems to be that of ensuring Sunni groups loyal to Wahhabism and allied to Saudi Arabia will control both those nations as well as neighbors wracked by unrest like Pakistan and Syria. Consequently, such countries become training grounds for al-Qaeda–affiliated groups and the Islamic State. Thus, over the past three years, in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and most recently Lebanon, the Saudi state has been able to utilize jihadis to launch a “proxy Sunni-Shia war” aimed specifically against Iran and its Shiite and Alawite allies, according to US Vice President Joe Biden. Saudi action was initially directed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom’s former ambassador to Washington and ex–intelligence chief, who had warned Dearlove, even prior to 9/11, that “the time is not far off, in the Middle East when it will be literally, ‘God help the Shia.’ More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”